Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id CAA06688 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 16 Feb 2000 02:58:30 GMT Message-Id: <200002160257.VAA05941@mail2.lig.bellsouth.net> From: "Joe E. Dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 21:00:47 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: What are memes made of? References: <200002160047.TAA24380@mail1.lig.bellsouth.net> In-reply-to: <Pine.WNT.4.21.0002151805330.-334975@Starship051.cbe.wwu.edu> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12b) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Date sent: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 18:37:07 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)
From: TJ Olney <market@cc.wwu.edu>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: What are memes made of?
Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Woe is me! Hold up here! I think I see a black cloud of miasma on the
> horizon! No! It's Shiva wielding Occam's razor!
>
One must not multiply BEYOND NECESSITY, good William
maintained; I am maintaining that consideration of intention,
signification and indeed subjectivity, is necessary in a successful
memetic ontology.
>
> I hate to break it to so erudite a correspondent (especially since he has
> graciously shared with me privately his own memesets about language, tools
> and conciousness), but a "genuine memetic ontology" will itself be a
> memeset and there is no way around that one. We'll just have to deal with
> it the best we can.
>
That does present a difficulty, for it is very difficult for an ontology to
be recursively self-transparent while avoiding infinite regress.
>
> On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Joe E. Dees wrote:
> > Religious or ideological considerations, whether eastern, western,
> > or whatever, are memesets themselves and can have no place in
> > any serious endeavor to construct a genuine memetic ontology.
>
> And then in another message, and after some excellent material, slipped
> this in:
> >The evolution of self-conscious awareness is a necessary a priori
> >and a sine qua non for memes to exist.
>
> Indicating that there is still no agreement about the nature of memes or
> that the famous songbirds are self-concious.
>
Memes involve intention and signification, and as such are
restricted to creation/mutation within and transmission/reception
between self-consciously aware beings. The presence of self-
conscious awareness a matter of the necessary quantity of
neurons, axons and synapses being intertwined by sufficient
complexity to breach the Godelian threshhold and permit self-
referentiality. We have as of yet failed to find any bird which can
pass the mirror test (regarding an image of themselves in a mirror
with an anomalous dab of paint daubed on the nose/beak, and
touching their own snout rather than the one in the mirror), which
distinguishes between the understanding that the image is of
themselves and the erroneous assumption that such a reflected
image is one of a conspecific (another member of the same
species) (SOCIAL COGNITION AND THE ACQUISITION OF SELF
by Lewis and Brooks-Gunn). As of yet, only humans and the great
apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and bonobos) have
passed such a test.
>
> I for one believe that a better grounding for the concept is that of
> "self-replicating patterned data," a grounding that requires no
> self-conciousness, only some agent that will replicate the pattern of
> data.
>
This definition could apply equally to genes, and therein lies its flaw
(not meme-specific).
>
> Regards,
> TJ Olney
>
> -- TJ Olney Western Washington University - Not all those who wander are lost.
> For the musical version of this thought: http://mp3.musicmatch.com/artists/artists.cgi?id=113&display=1
>
>
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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